Joker · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Todd Phillips's Joker is organised around the affection-image in its most extreme form: Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck enters scenes not as an agent who shapes events but as a surface where feeling registers before anything happens. The involuntary laughing fits, the bathroom-mirror weeping, the slow unlocking of a grin that becomes the film's governing image — these are not punctuation marks between plot points; they are the film, each close-up a sustained study of emotion with nowhere to discharge. Hildur Guðnadóttir's solo cello scores these faces like a second interior monologue. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher makes the interiority architectural through mise-en-scène: Arthur begins the film in spaces that visibly compress him — drop ceilings, institutional corridors, the refrigerator he climbs into for warmth — and as he transforms, the frame opens. The staircase ascent in the Bronx is the film's single most composed image: full anamorphic width, Arthur moving upward against grey daylight, the city's geometry for once giving his body room. Composition enacts what the screenplay can only declare. Most disquieting is the film's commitment to the powers of the false: fantasy sequences bleed into documentary-style realism without a seam until a final Arkham framing retroactively suggests the entire narrative may be confabulation — Arthur not remembering but inventing, the camera complicit throughout. This device, a subjective voiceover shaping an alienated urban male whose violence the film declines to adjudicate, is lifted almost verbatim from Taxi Driver (1976), whose chiaroscuro 35mm methodology and solo-instrument score Sher and Guðnadóttir extend note for note.